As we welcome in the new year, I want to express thanks to my supporters, collectors, family and friends for a wonderful 2014! Over $2,000 was donated to Equamore Horse Sanctuaryhttp://www.equamore.org, Friends of the Animal Shelter http://www.fotas.org, and Sanctuary One http://www.sanctuaryone.org, based on art sales. An additional $3,300 in artwork was donated to non-profit groups across the country to assist with fundraising efforts. A complete list of those organizations will be added to my website in the coming weeks.

In 2015, my work will continue to be available at Art & Soul Gallery in Ashland, and through my online store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/DanaFeagin. In August, I am the featured artist at Art & Soul Gallery with a new show, “The Funny Farm”, which opens on First Friday, August 7th, and in October, I am once again participating in the Ashland Open Studio Tour. If you didn’t get a chance to visit my home studio last year, and you are in the area October 10th &11th, I’d love to see you!

The completed paintings of Pookie, Zeus and Zena are soon to be headed down to California! They are part of the “Limitless Love” project, which is now a 501(C)(3) – for a traveling museum show featuring artwork of Pookie, Zeus and Zena. Admission fees to the show will be donated to an animal charity. These sweet dogs are being memorialized in a wide variety of art forms and styles by over 100 artists in the US and Europe – paintings, drawings, Legos, animation, etc. My commission was to capture Pookie, Zeus, and Zena’s expressions, in a collection of whimsical 10 x 10 inch portraits. Some of the photos I was working with were quite blurry, and the coloring in each dog changed quite a bit as the dogs aged. That made this a much bigger challenge than I anticipated, as I needed to get the same level of detail across all of the paintings and the colors/age of the dogs looking consistent across the paintings for each dog – something to keep in mind for future projects!

Visit me in my home studio during the first annual Ashland Gallery Association Open Studio Tour this weekend! This free event on October 11th and 12th from 11am to 5pm, offers a glimpse into the private creative spaces of 28 artists in Ashland, Talent and Phoenix, OR, working in different media. Maps for the tour are available at all Ashland galleries. For more information about the event, visit www.ashlandost.com.

Visitors are eligible to enter a drawing to win either two (2) tickets to the 2015 A Taste of Ashland art, food & wine event or $100 towards the purchase of local art at participating galleries.

My show of shelter animal paintings opens on First Friday in Ashland at Art & Soul Gallery! All of the paintings are of animals from the county shelter, Sanctuary One and Equamore Horse Sanctuary. Stop in and see me at Art & Soul Gallery from 5-8 on Friday, September 5th. Belle Fiore will be on-site doing wine tasting, and Jennifer Joss will be playing guitar. Hope to see you there!

Sanctuary One’s Summer Soiree and Benefit is July 19th at the Ashland Springs Hotel! This event replaces the Annual Bachelor Auction, which was very popular, but not completely in line with the mission of the Sanctuary. As with that event, I am also on the planning committee for the Summer Soiree.

We kick off the evening with cocktail hour & appetizers, along with shopping for farm-related items like dog cookies & bird houses made at the Sanctuary, and farm stays, tours & birthday parties complete with cupcakes from Kat von Cupcake, who donates all of her proceeds to the Sanctuary – Yay Kat! (She makes excellent vegan cookies and cakes as well!). My painting of Sanctuary One Rooster “Captain Morgan” (below) is for sale as well, with all of the money benefiting the Sanctuary. Larks is catering the gourmet vegetarian or vegan dinner served with wine, and dessert. There is a brief presentation about the Sanctuary, a raffle drawing for a stay at Villa de Poema, in Sayulita, Mexico (tickets for the raffle are just $10) and dancing to East Main Band until 10:30PM. Tickets to the event are $75, but our ticketing deadline is Friday, June 11th at 11AM.

Yesterday was the big move out of my studio at the Ashland Art Center, and down the street to Art and Soul Gallery. Laura and I shared a studio for 3 years, which was great, but it felt like time for a change. Now that I am running the air conditioner in my home studio to keep the bunnies comfy, it makes sense to spend more time painting there – and the dogs get to hang out with me more too. I just need to spend some time getting a bit more organized and tidy – with three dogs (Riley is too much of a couch potato to join us), the bunnies and me, all out in the studio together, I need to get some of my things off the floor! I will still be part of First Fridays, but at Art and Soul – and for this month, First Friday has been moved to July 11th since the 4th of July holiday is the first Friday of the month. Hope to see you at Art and Soul on July 11th from 5-8PM!

“Flower Girl”, my painting of Sophie Connor, makes an appearance again on this invitation to the Friends of the Animal Shelter “Paws to Celebrate” fundraiser. It is the first formal event to benefit our local animal shelter and is expected to become an annual event, similar to the PussNBoots Ball, a Halloween masquerade party. Paws to Celebrate is tonight at the Ashland Springs Hotel and the live auction includes one of my custom pet portraits, up to 16 x 20 inches in size. I think there are a few tickets still left, so maybe I will see you there!

This weekend Denise and I dropped off our work at the Grants Pass Museum of Art (229 SW “G” Street) for the show which opens on Tuesday. The space will be filled with our whimsical animal art until May 30th, with the opening reception this Friday, May 2nd from 5-9PM. Normal operating hours for the museum are Tuesday through Saturday 12-4PM.

I was pleasantly surprised to be contacted by the editor of Southern Oregon Magazine saying I would have a small feature article in their spring issue! I submitted four images and they selected Flower Girl, the Boxer dog painting below, which is also the same painting that will be featured on the Friends of the Animal Shelter invitation for their fundraiser this spring. Then, this morning, the painting sold to a collector from New York, who now owns four of my paintings. All in all, it’s been a good week!

This commission will be my biggest challenge to date – a series of nine paintings capturing the sweet quirkiness of Zena, Zeus and Pookie. They were such an important part of their owner’s life, that he is commissioning a large number of pieces, from different artists, in commemoration of their lives. Over the last few weeks, we have culled through a large number of pictures, some a bit blurry, and finally settled on these images. Today I finished drawing them out on gallery wrapped canvas, and hung them on my studio wall so I could see them all together. We are thinking each dog will have a different colored background, so I am still mulling over the possibilities. Let the painting begin!